Springsteen to premier new song on Sunday Night Football

I'm still not sure how I feel about The Boss playing the Superbowl, but it's becoming clear that the NFL had to sweeten the deal a bit before he signed on. Way to make 'em work for it, Bruce.

Are you ready for some football? Well, even if you're not, you'll probably want to tune in to the Cowboys/Redskins Sunday Night Football game on November 16. As NBC's Al Michaels announced last night: "Next week we'll have the world premiere of Springsteen's new song 'Workin' on a Dream' set to NFL highlights at halftime at next week's game." Springsteen performed an acoustic version of the new song last week in Cleveland; this will be the world's first chance to hear the studio recording.

The video above is that performance in Cleveland, which the MySpace Bulletin fails to mention was at a rally for Barack Obama.

Billy and Jimmy are bad role models

Matt Pinfield had Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin for what was apparently Billy's first radio interview in 3 years, on the morning before the first Smashing Pumpkins show in New York City in about 8 years. It was, for the most part, a candid, informative interview, and I enjoyed listening to it. Especially the part where Billy spoke at length about ways to connect more deeply with fans, like experimenting with new ways to release music and perform live, and where he interrupted Pinfield (who was about to play a song) to talk about the importance of unity amongst bands, and the common purpose of creating a body of music representative of this generation. It was a very weird, awesomely rock-star moment that I plan to listen to again when the interview goes online here later today.

But then came the question about the election, and it was revealed that Billy is "not a voter," which is his "controversial position," and that while Jimmy is a voter, he didn't vote this election because he was busy moving and just didn't have the time. The two then went on to talk about how wonderful it is that now anyone really can do anything and blah blah blah HOW CAN YOU BE "NOT A VOTER"? Seriously Billy, that's horse hockey.

Again, the interview will be here later today, if you're interested in hearing it yourself.

I want your flu baby, not just your cough.

Photo by Michael Halsband

More than a year ago I went to something that I could have sworn I wrote about on here before, but apparently failed to. My girlfriend was living up by Columbia, and they have this little room in the basement of St. Paul's Chapel on campus there (they call it PostCrypt) that they use for performances on Friday and Saturday nights. She had seen an ad for a special night with some special guests, so we went.

So three singer/songwriter types sat up on little stools and took turns telling stories and playing songs to a standing room only crowd of less than 100. The reason the guests went unnamed, I guess, was that one of them was Suzanne Vega, but the one that left the most lasting effect on me was someone I hadn't heard of before that night: one Richard Julian. He'd played a song about the fictional screw-up son of Jesus that would pop into my head randomly for months after that night, and I've been making efforts to see him when he plays in New York ever since.

I was about to write about what I like so much about him, when I found this quote, which I think sums it all up more nicely and concisely than I could. WFUV's Claudia Marshall:

Julian's guitar playing is athletic but subtle, and his secret weapon is his voice — not a croon so much as a plaintive wail that serves his songs well. He's my favorite New York singer-songwriter, period.

There's a 45 minute interview and 4 songs performed in-studio from WFUV where that quote came from. Highly recommended.

Anyway, Richard Julian is going to be playing at The Living Room in NYC every Monday in the month of November, hitting the stage around 10 pm. I'll be there at least once. You should too.

Springsteen does Halloween

Head on over to brucespringsteen.net and watch the video and download the free mp3 for "A Night With The Jersey Devil." Not sure how long it'll stay up past Halloween, so grab it while the grabbing's good.

It's a nice touch that the download page encourages, but does not mandate, email submission.

Happy Halloween.

Simon said "you suck," and Randy said "you suck."

More than a year ago, I downloaded a mixtape from Liberated Matter's Cross-Pollination series (which you can still download here) because it had a Kevin Devine song on it. I listened through the whole thing in hopes of finding something to sound cool telling my friends about, and the song with the most such potential was a ditty (yeah, I said that) about a hapless American Idol reject named "Stacy J," by Matt Singer. It's been a steady go-to flavor piece in playlists ever since around here, but it was only this month that the album containing "Stacy J" finally came out. And I like it a lot.

The Drought is unapologetically dorky, generous with well-placed fuckwords, and genuinely fun. You can sample the aforementioned "Stacy J" if you download that Cross-Pollination mixtape. You can also get the another version of that and one of album opener "The Poet" from Amie Street for free as part of a Family Records promotion if you go here. Why they don't have his actual album yet I do not know, but I imagine it's coming.

If you like these, you're going to like the whole record (hell, there are only 4 more songs on it, one of which contains the line "they'd tell their friends 'hey check it out, i think he's gonna whip it out, the most amazing dong you've ridden in the motherfuckin' world'"). So go get it.

Jaymay - Highline Ballroom, 10/20/08

This was a cool show. Stories in High Fidelity, they called it. A bunch of guys who have written about rock got up and read things they had written, including a reading about a GNR cover band by Mr. Chuck Klosterman, and one from Dan Kennedy, from his book Rock On: An Office Power Ballad (which I loved when I read it a few months ago).

And then Jaymay hit the stage solo, for what started as a fun (if not completely sober) take on some of my favorites ("Blue Skies" FTW), and ended in the kind of special-guest-on-stage-scene that the word "shitshow" was invented for. I personally thought it was a lot of fun, but judging from the way half the audience headed for the exits like they were fleeing a bad fart, not everybody agreed with me.

Honestly Bruno, where did all that come from?

More pics (from an iPhone) of one of the awesommest/weirdest things I've ever seen below.

Now Shipping: EPIC FAIL

Maybe it's just because I haven't been paying attention as closely as I used to, but I was just thinking the other day about how the Never-Ending Folly of the Major Label seems to have quieted down these past few months. Kinda like how when you're a kid and your dad takes you fishing for the first time and after a bunch of thrashing around, your catch lays still. And then you think it's dead so you reach out to touch it and then it's not dead and it scares the shit out of you. Anyway, today I got this breathless joint press release from SanDisk and all the majors, heralding the arrival of the slotMusic card. Flop flop floppity flop.

*This is a big deal.* Its the first time the major labels and retailers have unanimously embraced a new physical format in over 25 years. These cards play in 70 million phones in the US and a billion devices worldwide. Imagine if there were that many CD players in 1982.

...

The world’s four largest music companies and SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK), a leading seller of MP3 players and flash memory cards in the United States, today unveiled the full list of artists joining the inaugural slotMusic line-up. Starting this week, music fans can purchase slotMusic cards—microSD™ cards with pre-loaded, high quality, DRM-free MP3 music—featuring new release albums from favorite artists like Coldplay, Katy Perry, Leona Lewis, Rihanna and Robin Thicke and catalog titles from Elvis, Abba and more.

Within days of shipping, slotMusic cards will arrive on the shelves of Best Buy and Wal-Mart in the United States, with a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $14.99. slotMusic makes today’s hottest music available on interoperable microSD cards that let fans instantly plug and play albums into their microSD slot-enabled mobile phones, portable media players, computers, and an increasing number of car stereos.

It's too easy not to note that the boast of an "increasing number" means very little when you're starting at near zero, that's not what really rankles my shankles.

Look, I (clearly) have no insight into how this doodiebaby was sculpted, but the following images keep running through my head, and they're what I find especially bothersome:

• The amount of time wasted in meetings, executives working themselves into a lather about the rebirth of physical sales, and the fall of the mp3.
• The amount of money wasted on developing a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
• The vast number of real problems that could have been solved with a redirection of all that time and money.
  
• The laugably mistaken fantasy of Morris and Bronfman that this might end the hegemony of the hated iPod.
  
• The bewildered, reluctant yes-man, shaking his head as he walks out of the board room after one of these meetings about slotMusic, heading back to his desk to update his resume.